Brain in a Vat and the Emperor's New Clothes

2017
By
Qiu Zhijie

The idea of "Brain in a Vat" was originally conceived
philosophically. In the field of epistemology, philosophers have
ardently and painstakingly been arguing where our knowledge about the
outside world essentially comes from. A radical empiricism amounts to a
radical solipsism: if the source of our knowledge was our sensations
about the outside world, our mind would be just a blank slate (as John
Locke put it), receiving projections cast by the outside world. If so,
these projections might as well be fabricated, manipulated, or designed
by some powerful being, and this false representation of the world we
are served might have nothing to do with the real world. And some day,
our brain may think that this world doesn't really exist, and our
sensations are only illusions produced by some mechanism disorder. Thus
we easily arrive at the world of George Berkeley's solipsism.

So the idea of "Brain in a Vat" presents a world of conspiracies. A
brain is soaked in nutrition solution, attached by numerous electrodes
feeding it various neuro-electronic signals, which describe a
non-existent world and tell all the colorful stories. Everything for
which this brain is excited, joyful, angry, or grieved is just some
signals and conditioned responses induced by them. This world of
conspiracies is closely connected with such dystopian words as "control"
and "brainwashing", deeply terrifying us.

But as we also know, if we think about it, "Brain in a Vat" is the
ideal of the modern mass entertainment. From a church of "total work of
art" to panoramic paintings, from cinemas to video game gadgets, from
rave nightclubs to collective hysteria spaces celebrated by pop singers
and their fans, all these hanker after "immersive experience". In
Hollywood sci-fi movies, the narratives alternate between rebelling
machines and fabricated imaginary world. The phrase "spirit of play" has
many connotations, such as "at leisure", "not essential", "deal with
it playfully", or "don't take it too seriously"; now it seems to point
to "the real seems unreal when the unreal seems real", and we easily
indulge in and get addicted to this spirit, which has become something
morbid in need of abstinence.

In fact VR is not something new. The early versions of today's VR
devices were used as training tools decades ago, particularly in
training simulators for fighter jet pilots and surgery interns. In that
time, the VR technology was presumably at a basic stage, its simulative
and interactive levels being relatively low; but it surely sufficed its
function as a training tool to provide a simulated environment and build
up connections through interaction between the body reactions and
environmental data. This kind of virtual experience typically push the
realism to an extreme, aiming at the classical experience of "as if
bodily present in that scene". Fire scenes, battlefields, or intestinal
tracts - targets of the simulation - are extreme environments, chances
being low to experience them in daily life, but they do exist in the
world, only difficult to reach or reconstruct. while VR was originally a
training method, its explosion today is an entertaining one. Like
movie, VR as game experiences is essentially a dreamwork factory,
destined to go after sensation stimulation and novelty seeking.
Therefore, to creat brand-new experiences nonexistent in the world is
one of its major goals. In such immersive experiences a danger has been
lurking, that is, the separation of the experienced sensual environment
and the physical environment of the experiencer's real body.

If it is just about entertainment, we might as well make a grin and
comment that the most potential applications of VR would be in fields
like the virtual red-light district or the first person perspective
porn, and this is no big deal. And if someone like to immerse himself
day and night in good illusions provided by VR, he is no other than an
enthusiastic cinema goer or an internet game addicted teen. And it is
understandable that some companies make use of VR technology to sell
houses, experiences, or holiday tour. Even in the case that our
government is investing heavily and everywhere to build national VR
education laboratories (it is now a sort of fashion), some projects are
useful, some are colorful decorations, and such kind of waist of money
is anyway not so outrageous. And some small maker spaces brandish the
banner of Steam Education, fooling some small schools to set up VR
curriculums to demonstrate seabed scenes or outer space world - this is
still interesting. However, when kindergartens want to use VR to teach
kids Chinese characters, it is a little disturbing. Once in my
classroom, a student told me he was trying to make use of VR in
children's early education, and I immediately dissuaded him, and asked
him to think twice, or thrice.

It is said that someone has used VR curriculums in the therapy of
autistic kids, which is capable of integrating their senses into
apperception. I totally believe this. At the hands of developmental
psychologists, this could be an invaluable kind of art therapy. But as
the saying goes, "any medicine is 30% poisonous"; it is very possible
that a method capable of integrating broken and separate senses may also
break already integrated, inter-connected senses into pieces. For
normal kids, the traditional methods of storytelling, picture
description, or even learning by rote has been working for millennia in
knowledge transferring and emotion construction, and it is natural to
continue using them. And if in this era of "everyone is an
entrepreneur", various small maker spaces pick up VR technologies that
haven't passed discreet psychological experiments, and make extensive
use of them in education, throwing kids of immature personality and weak
self into a scene in which the virtual and the reality are drastically
separated, it is doubtful whether this is healthy for children's minds.

Ideas like "as if bodily present in that scene" or "situational
teaching" are good, but now the imaginary world is invading the real
one, and the experiencer may not be able to distinguish the game from
the reality anymore. The mild result is just that one would become
unreliable, while the serious result is a disease called
"depersonlization" in psychiatry. It is absurd that while the public is
fiercely arguing whether the GMO food is edible, almost none has warned
against the applications of VR - which may affect the psychological
health - in the field of children education. It is possible that under
the cover of the goodwill and wishful fashion of Steam Education, we are
producing - in accordance with Descartes' logic fallacy - a new
generation of post-human whose mind and body are separated.

Furthermore, after having watched so many conspiracy-theory
narratives of Hollywood sci-fi movies, we feel there must be something
wrong about a project that encapsulate a human being into a set of
artificial sensations. It strongly indicates a body-controlling
mechanism with some ulterior motive. Starting from immersive
experiences, the next step is brainwashing, and brainwashing is no doubt
a kind of manipulation, a kind of authoritarianism. In such a power
relation structure, VR can be naturally understood as slavers'
entertainment. Just imagine: the future slave owners live in real Mount
Huang or beside real West Lake, enjoying fresh and crisp air, while the
lowest slaves huddle in their small rooms wearing VR glasses and
thinking they are also in Mount Huang or beside West Lake. "Equality"
will be produced and distributed industrially.

When Chen Baoyang tried to reflect ontologically on VR, which is a
kind of experience we are unprepared to deal with, he proposed three
tactics:

First, he constructed a glass labyrinth to awaken VR-glasses wearers'
bodies. When the experiencer walks inside the virtual space, he often
encounters the walls of the labyrinth between which his body is
residing. In those moments the momentary recover of body sensation will
drag him out of the virtual scene, recreating the sense of "here and
now". The sense of touch triggered by the walls subverts the immersive
experience, and it is a kind of destruction, just as some body turned on
a flashlight in a cinema and the wall decorations of the dark hall
grasped your attention while you were immersed in the movie plot the
previous moment. The clash of bodily experiences and virtual experiences
present an opportunity for him to be distracted and escape from
brainwashing through body. However, in that virtual environment some
details coincide with parts of the glass labyrinth, which complicates
this simple contrast.

Secondly, if we just want to "awaken" somebody, we only need to nudge
those virtual glasses fools from time to time, or just construct a
normal labyrinth. But Chen gives us a glass labyrinth. What are the
implications of glasses here? Not only does this labyrinth let us bump
around in it, it is also supposed to be seen by us. We can stand aside,
watching those sleepwalkers in the labyrinth who are wearing glasses and
rambling. Here the labyrinth amounts to a Foucaultian panopticon, an
extreme stage displaying the class situation of VR immersers. Wasn't I
right when I said above that VR will become the entertainment of slaves?
Look at those people sleepwalking in the glass box: they somewhat look
like slaves, don't they?

Now the third tactics. The smell of a panopticon becomes stronger due
to a design in the installation: the labyrinth is in fact two
labyrinths, both physically and virtually. The visitor can freely decide
which one to enter. The two virtual spaces provided by the two mazes
are interconnected, inter-visible, and inter-embedded. Inside any one of
the two spaces, the experiencer can see a sand table model, a miniature
version of the another space. Watching a miniature model naturally
suggest a condescending perspective of god. But in this twofold virtual
reality scenario, the spacetime of a "god" has been made into a
miniature model in another spacetime. The gods here are mortals
overlooked there. This inter-embedded structure turns Chen's two mazes
into a sort of Taijitu ("Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate") - white
inside black, and black inside white, as if each space contains a
wormhole leading to another one.

If unpreparedly bumping into the glass wall is like a barrel of cold
water being poured into the mist of virtual reality, this smaller space
embedded in the virtual space is like an enlightening sharp warning
detonated inside the virtual world. This doesn't just remind of Echer's
impossible circles or word plays like "there is a temple in the
mountain, and a monk in the temple", but hits the bullseye of VR: we who
are watching this exhibition. Is there a higher being overlooking us
above our so-called real world? In his eyes, are we only tiny ants who
are busy holding and watching the exhibition? The real world and the
virtual world are just like Tajitu's double fishes, inter-embedded,
transforming and flowing into each other.

Today many artists has been using VR technology, or about to, but
most of them are still under the spell of the media utopia of VR.
Various works cheers the advent of this new form of experience, chanting
for the opportunities it may provide in entertainment and education,
with no spare time to comprehensively reflect on its spiritual and
sensual implications. And many unreflecting people (more in number), who
are growing into content providers of the giant VR entertainment
industry, vigorously pursues the Creation pleasure of a model-building
laborer, constructing one real or surreal environment after another to
accommodate rambling visitors.

The exhibition of Chen Baoyang is a work that reflects on the
politics of VR. Wisdom needn't be profound. Wisdom often is on the
surface. The emperor is naked, but one who has been brainwashed by a
full set of mechanism will see the emperor's gorgeous new clothes. To
speak out that the emperor wears nothing, what one needs is perhaps not
some acute insight, but courage.